On 14 October 1990, five days after announcing his retirement from conducting, Leonard Bernstein died in his New York apartment at “The Dakota.” Bernstein had been ill for years as he suffered from emphysema, asthma attacks and bouts of bronchitis

In the late 20th century, Bernstein’s Overture to his opera Candide was the most performed piece of contemporary classical music, or so the secretary at ASCAP told me in the 1980s when I was sent to go pick up the

Inspired, as always, by the things around him, Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) took a cookbook off the shelf and created a set of 4 humorous songs. Émile Dumont’s La Bonne Cuisine Française (Tout ce qui a rapport à la table, manuel-guide

On 26 September 1957, the Winter Garden Theatre—one of the Broadway theatres located between 50th and 51st Streets in midtown Manhattan—opened with a musical inspired by William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. With a libretto by Arthur Laurents, lyrics by Stephen

Leonard Bernstein’s Mass was commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy as part of the opening ceremony for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. It premiered on 8 September 1971 and is based on the Roman Catholic

Leonard Bernstein had always longed to write the Great American Opera. Yet, as it happens, he ended up writing the great American musical! In 1949, the theater producer and dance choreographer Jerome Robbins envisioned a modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo

Leonard Bernstein undoubtedly was one of the most supremely talented interpretive musicians of the 20th century. Yet his compositional talents, as Mstislav Rostropovich has argued, “are simply not on par with his abilities as an interpreter.” Leon Botstein, President of